


LIKE, LIKE LIKE

by spicyshimmy, stonelions



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Fanart, First Kiss, M/M, Slash, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:45:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonelions/pseuds/stonelions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Kaidan kissed Shepard for the first time. (Teen AU, set before Kaidan Always and Shepard Is.) <i>Kaidan shouldn’t have had the rest of Shepard’s beer. But whenever Kaidan asked, Shepard always told him ‘sure,’ and Kaidan kept wondering if he should wait for a no that wasn’t ever gonna come. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	LIKE, LIKE LIKE

Kaidan shouldn’t have had the rest of Shepard’s beer. But whenever Kaidan asked, Shepard always told him ‘sure,’ and Kaidan kept wondering if he should wait for a no that wasn’t ever gonna come.

Mom would’ve said that wasn’t the right way to look at it. “Why not a yes?” she’d ask, and Kaidan would stir his cocoa and shrug, admitting _Yeah, OK. Why not a yes_. But he was a different person with Mom than who he was with Shepard: somebody who had self-restraint, for example, and didn’t bury his face in a friend’s neck for what felt like hours, lips closing over his pulse.

People did dumb stuff when they were drunk. Stuff they didn’t plan. Stuff they’d been thinking about for weeks, even months. Stuff they saw on the backs of their eyelids when they closed their eyes and stuff they wanted to see when they opened them again.

Sometimes, Kaidan woke up while the credits were rolling on a movie he’d actually wanted to watch, tucked up against Shepard’s side—a crease from Shepard’s wrinkled t-shirt sleeve stamped into Kaidan’s cheek.

Sometimes, Shepard left this smell on Kaidan’s sheets that he wished his body wouldn’t roll away, that he didn’t want to wash off in the laundry.

Sometimes, all the time, Shepard was tight muscle and faded jeans and sharp cheekbones and blue eyes and freckles on his cheeks, freckles on his throat, maybe freckles on his chest and back, and Kaidan had to lock his door and shove his hand down his briefs and try not to think about what he was thinking about when he came.

That never worked. Shepard had stretched his arms over his head by the bleachers where he was waiting for Kaidan at lunch—and Kaidan had seen, with painful clarity, the line of not-so-dark hair under Shepard’s navel where his t-shirt rode up, Shepard’s fingers ruffling the bangs he needed to cut.

“Hey,” Kaidan had said. Just hey. Nothing special, nothing that’d change or ruin anything. And then he’d thought about it ever since: flat on his back in bed, closing the skylight shades so he could touch himself and not feel like he was being watched.

Shepard didn’t know about it, of course. Or maybe he did. Maybe Kaidan’s face buried in Shepard’s neck, lips closing over his pulse, for what felt like hours…

That might’ve done it.

But being drunk kept him from panicking. It was coming up on him like a headache, but when it’d hit—he’d have to be more sober for that.

“Hey,” Kaidan said against Shepard’s throat, trying to remember how he’d gotten there. Asking if Shepard was going to finish his beer, Shepard saying ‘sure,’ and Kaidan tilting his head back, mouth around the rim of the bottle. He’d licked it after and Shepard was looking at him, with his blue eyes and his sharp cheekbones and the freckles on his cheeks, the one on his neck that Kaidan wanted to kiss so, so badly.

“Hey,” Shepard said.

Kaidan shouldn’t have, but he went for the freckle anyway. He pressed his lips around it and touched his tongue to where he thought it had to be. He sucked on Shepard’s skin and the salt of it mingled with the taste of beer in his mouth and even then, part of him couldn’t believe he was actually doing it.

Shepard was such a babe. That was what he was. He was a total babe. Kaidan felt like a loser, an awkward nerdy loser, and if he stopped to examine the situation beyond the moments—all these little moments of gravity pushing and pulling them into one another—it gave him a deep, sinking feeling that somebody was playing the meanest possible prank on him. Any second there’d be a reveal, that nasty gotcha, and he’d never live it down.

Sometimes Kaidan compared them to fictional characters in his head, trying to land on an accurate dynamic. Shepard was a Daniel Desario, a Jeff Winger, even a Buffy Summers. He didn’t seem to notice it, but he had this charisma. People liked Shepard whether Shepard tried to make them or not—and he never tried.

That was probably why they liked him so much, one of those rules of attraction Kaidan understood but could never follow. He was a try-hard; not that he wanted to be things he wasn’t but more that he _literally_ tried hard at everything he did.

He thought about Willow and Xander, their almost kiss in season two and the way tension could suddenly snap tight between two people and hum like power lines. Except Shepard was still more of a Buffy.

When Kaidan wondered where that left him in that scenario, he decided he was a Willow: the bookish type, the level-headed one. Only Willow had never sucked on Buffy’s neck.

At least there was definitely fanfiction about it.

What a stupid thing to think, Kaidan told himself, and squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to ignore his brain, even though it was hard and he was bad at it. Especially lately, for a long time now, even when he was in the middle of other things. Since Shepard had traipsed home with him that one day months ago, forever ago, he’d been inside Kaidan’s head all the time, then inside his stomach, then inside his chest.

It was a distraction and it was affecting his schoolwork. The number of times he’d sat down at his desk, spread his homework out, and proceeded to immediately think about Shepard instead of doing his algebra was embarrassing. It was every time, all the time, Kaidan pulling his glasses off and pushing the heels of his palms into his eyes to try and force Shepard into the background. Kaidan face down on his desk making frustrated Wookiee noises when it didn’t work. Kaidan face down on his bed where Shepard had been sitting and making more Wookiee noises, because _seriously._

And then, there was this: Kaidan flopping against Shepard’s side on purpose and telling him he liked him. Like, _like_ liked him. And meaning it, even though it was the alcohol loosening his chest up enough that it finally, finally came out.

Sometimes you had to roll with the situation you got yourself into. Kaidan could—and did—think of a million reasons why it was a terrible idea but what he kept coming back to, over and over again, was that Shepard wasn’t pushing him away.

It was scientific, Liara would have argued. You had to rely on external feedback instead of the stuff inside your own head. Reality had to mean more than the things you made up to scare sense into yourself. It had to.

And sometimes, all it took to mainline some adrenaline straight to your courage center was believing that one small thing could mean something…bigger.

Well, believing in that and a couple of beers.

Shepard still wasn’t pushing him away.

“You’re such a babe,” Kaidan murmured over Shepard’s pulse. “You know that, right? You know that.” 

“Hey,” Shepard said, _heeey,_ more of a sigh than a greeting; there was even more meaning behind it than that, something Kaidan didn’t know how to translate yet, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t studied. Hard. So stupidly, constantly hard. Every shift, every flex, every inch of Shepard—every chance to crack the code or put another piece of the puzzle in place—there were just too many variables in the equation and Kaidan didn’t have enough information to form a starting point, much less come to a conclusion.

But Shepard’s arm was around his shoulders, Shepard’s palm kind of, _sort_ of on Kaidan’s bicep, the heat of Shepard’s body mixing with the heat of Kaidan’s breath on his throat.

Shepard still wasn’t pushing him away. He wasn’t bringing Kaidan closer, either, but it was really…

Really warm. And really a start.

“I’m not just saying that,” Kaidan said. “You’re really…warm. But also—hot.”

“Okay,” Shepard replied, and it rhymed with _hey_.

The thing about the scientific method and research and setting out with a statement of purpose and a procedure was that—when you discovered what you were looking for, that element, that chemical reaction, something no one had ever discovered before, volatile and unpredictable and _also hot_ —you had to be ready to contain it. To figure it out. To bottle it up instead of letting it explode, or kill you from radiation like Marie Curie.

Aplastic Anemia.

Kaidan had done a paper on that.

And he’d thought it was sad, really sad, that what you studied and what you loved and what you lived for could be what killed you. And he thought it was sad now that he was thinking about the muscles on Shepard’s stomach and Marie Curie’s Aplastic Anemia at the same time. And he’d had too much to drink, and he’d kissed Shepard’s freckle, and Shepard still wasn’t pushing him away, the pulse under Kaidan’s mouth beating against his lips.

“You’re warm, too,” Shepard said. Like he was saying it from somewhere else. “You’re really warm, Kaidan.”

Kaidan needed that dictionary, an instant online Shepard to English translation. Something that’d make his stomach stop tying itself up while his brain scrambled to figure it out, for a start. But to be honest—and the same thing could be said for anyone who devoted their life to any kind of research—it wasn’t about figuring it out. It was about _needing_ to figure it out.

At least Kaidan stopped himself before saying anything about needing Shepard or even wanting him. The second part was obvious; the first part was over the top.

Kaidan didn’t want to be clingy. Even if, technically, he was clinging. Actually, full-bodied, smashed up against Shepard and totally smashed at the same time.

“Thanks,” Kaidan said. The word slurred over Shepard’s skin and Kaidan felt him shiver, once, the hard muscles in his stomach jumping.

Kaidan had a hand on his stomach.

He honestly didn’t remember putting it there.

“God,” he added, because Shepard was the one who was really hard, in the ways that counted—up and down, around his bellybutton, above his jeans, under the cotton of his t-shirt. “You are _so hot_.”

Shepard’s hand moved off Kaidan’s arm and Kaidan’s heart rabbited into his throat. For that split second, Kaidan thought he’d pushed too far, opened his big dumb hopeful mouth one too many times in a night and finally crossed a line. _The_ line. But Shepard didn’t pull away or push him away. Instead, his palm pressed into the small of Kaidan’s back.

“Okay, Kaidan,” Shepard said. He rubbed at the indent along Kaidan’s spine: a slow, easy up-and-down drag of his fingertips. Shepard was humoring him—that much Kaidan could translate without a dictionary—but he was also touching him in a way he never had before. At least, not this obviously.

Obvious and Shepard were supposed to be mutually exclusive variables.

Mixed signals. Kaidan was getting a lot of mixed signals. He’d botched the experiment before he’d even started because he was too invested to keep a level head. So much for the scientific method.

Kaidan pressed his fingers against Shepard’s hard stomach to keep from thinking about it, somewhere above his navel. There was no give other than his exhalations and nothing soft besides the cotton of his t-shirt.

And then, Shepard’s stomach growled.

Kaidan paused before he laughed, just a quiet, nervous laugh, into Shepard’s neck. “You’re hungry,” he said, palm still resting in place.

Shepard let out a cough and all the muscles in his abdomen tensed. It wasn’t possible for them to get harder and they got harder anyway. “Yeah,” he said. “A little.”

“Let’s get something,” Kaidan said.

“It’s kinda late.” Shepard was looking over his shoulder, back toward the city. Just a few lights in the darkness. If it hadn’t been so unpredictable, it would’ve been really great. “Not much open.”

It was way after midnight. Probably way after one o’clock, given how long Kaidan had been sucking on Shepard’s neck. His cheeks got hot at the thought and, finally, he moved away, just enough to get his phone out of his pocket. The screen lit up and yeah, Kaidan had been at Shepard’s throat until a quarter to two. He just didn’t know exactly when he’d started.

Vancouver wasn’t good at staying up much past midnight—or at least, most of the restaurants weren’t. There was pizza and fast food and that was about it. Shepard’s favorite, even if he wouldn’t bring it up.

“Oh, hey,” Kaidan said. He’d remembered something. “Do you like pho?” 

Shepard shrugged. “I guess.”

How anybody could be so committed to being non-committal was a total mystery. Kaidan wanted to ask “Is there anything you get excited about, Shepard? Anything you _like_? Or, heaven forbid, anything you love? _Other_ than Star Wars, because that _so_ doesn’t count.” 

Instead Kaidan said “C’mon,” and stood up. Shepard’s fingers fell away from his back and he still felt their warmth on him, five dots of it on skin instead of cotton. It took resolve to leave Shepard’s orbit, but Kaidan had a feeling Shepard’s gravity had less pull with the public transit system than it did with him. They were running short on time. “There’s a twenty-four hour place on Broadway. We can still catch a bus, if we hurry.”

“Sure,” Shepard said.

They caught the bus, making a quick connection. They didn’t touch each other once, sitting side by side, not even bumping hips—not that they hadn’t gone through awkward silences before, but this one meant more—and twenty minutes later they were across from one another in an almost empty restaurant. They had their pick of empty tables and Kaidan chose the one next to the window; the only other patrons were two female cops, the intermittent chirp of their radios breaking up the monotony of the bad hip hop as it funneled through the wall-mounted speakers.

So it was kind of like a date.

But Kaidan knew he was reaching and he also knew how desperate that was.

“Could you, um, pass the sriracha?” he asked. Shepard blinked and Kaidan could’ve kicked himself under the table. “The hot sauce with the green—yeah, that’s it.”

Shepard handed it over. Kaidan told himself it was the opposite of a date; it was just pho, and he’d asked Shepard to pass the sriracha, and nobody did that. Nobody. Not even Kaidan’s mom would’ve done that and she was his mom.

“Hot,” Kaidan said, blowing on some of the noodles to cool them down. He would’ve winced, but it was too late even for that.

_You are_ so _hot._

He could still kind of taste Shepard’s skin on his bottom lip, behind his teeth. The hot soup and the hot sauce were going to burn it away, which was what Kaidan needed and not what he wanted, because Kaidan was an idiot who shouldn’t have told somebody the truth about liking him. _Like_ liking him. Not when they were friends; not when they spent so much time together. Not when Kaidan stared at the window whenever Shepard had said he was going to be coming over; not when the usual strategy of getting homework out of the way first didn’t work because he was thinking too much about Shepard; not when he kept going back to the one time he’d fallen asleep with his head on Shepard’s thigh and when he sat up, Shepard’s knuckles brushed the small of his back where his t-shirt was riding up.

It was an accident. Shepard probably hadn’t noticed it. And Kaidan thought about it for days, weeks—he was _still_ thinking about it.

Just like he could still kind of taste Shepard’s skin.

He swiped his tongue over his lips and burnt it on the pho a few seconds later. “Hot,” he mumbled again.

The easy silences, the conversations about nothing, the way Shepard ruffled his own hair when it was getting long and stared—with his blue eyes—into the distance over Kaidan’s shoulder…

Kaidan had practically sucked that out of Shepard’s throat. He was a vampire who didn’t suck blood—he just sucked. He fed on comfort or destroyed it or poisoned it or whatever.

At least the pho was good.

He was almost expecting Shepard to dump a ton of sriracha into his soup—he was pretty sure that was a thing Shepard and Garrus would’ve done together, proving who could take the heat and who couldn’t—but Shepard was slurping the noodles down plain.

He must’ve been really hungry.

“Sorry,” Kaidan said, messing with the paper he’d pulled off his chopsticks.

“For what?” Shepard asked.

_For messing everything up,_ Kaidan thought.

“For hogging the hot sauce,” he said.

Shepard shrugged with one shoulder, making it all look so easy. Some people could do that and Kaidan had really believed—before he met Shepard—that he was okay with not being one of them.

“It’s fine.” Shepard rested his chopsticks on his mouth, just the tips pressed into the swell of his bottom lip. As if Kaidan didn’t already want to kiss him so much all the time it hurt—so much he’d actually done it, and now they were eating pho and probably never going to talk about it again.

“You’ve got a…” Kaidan pointed. “Uh. On your neck.”

“Huh,” Shepard said.

Kaidan shouldn’t have expected anything else.

*

  


When Shepard had pho with Garrus, it was all about taking the pain. At least, that was what Garrus believed and had to keep on believing—because otherwise, Shepard would never be able to look him straight in the eye again.

Shepard had learned early to game the system: when Garrus went for the stuff in the red bottle, Shepard went for the stuff in the other bottle, which was sweet and dark and hid the fact that he added almost no—what had Kaidan called it? Sriracha?—at all. He’d even figured out a way to sequester his share of the jalapenos using bean sprouts, and if anybody ever needed to know how to keep chili oil afloat on a single leaf of basil, Shepard could tell them.

Sometimes, he thought of it like training. The resulting brew was at least edible, though it still made Shepard’s eyebrows sweat. He could hardly even look at the sea of heat in Garrus’s bowl without feeling the heat in the back of his throat, a tiny flinch in the top of his cheek. 

But you expected that kind of thing from Garrus. He was bushido like that. Stand under the freezing cold waterfall until you don’t feel it anymore; walk across the hot coals until your feet stop burning. Or, in the case of pho, ingest the noodle equivalent of hot coals until your esophagus is hardened like steel.

What Shepard hadn’t expected was for Kaidan to ask for the hot sauce. Kaidan’s soup was no Vakarian brew, but there were two jalapeno slices in there and splotches of chili oil adrift with the green onions and other leafy stuff. Add sriracha to the mix and Kaidan was no slouch.

Kaidan was always surprising him.

“Huh?” Shepard had been so busy thinking about Kaidan, staring into his noodles to avoid staring at Kaidan on the other side of the table, that he’d missed the actual stuff Kaidan was saying.

Weird, how that worked. And great and stupid and hotter than the sriracha.

Kaidan was pressing his lips together like he was trying to bite them both inside his mouth. His eyebrows were doing that little worried thing in the middle, where they bent upward just enough to put two slight dots in his forehead. He cleared his throat and touched his hand to the side of his own neck. “I said, you’ve got a… Um.” His cheeks were rose pink and getting hotter, deep brown eyes not meeting Shepard’s.

Shepard blinked. Then he mirrored Kaidan and touched the side of his neck, the spot where Kaidan’s lips had been pressed, sucking his skin and telling him that he liked him, _like_ liked him, and that he was hot, leaving moist breath and a—

A bruise. _A hickey_.

Shepard snapped his hand away from his neck, too quickly. He bumped the ends of his chopsticks and they clattered off the rim of his bowl; he overcompensated on his lunge to grab them and came within an inch of knocking his soup into his lap. He didn’t, and nothing broke, and he saved the chopsticks from falling on the floor, but he could feel his ears going as red as Kaidan’s cheeks on the side of his head.

Then, he took a deep breath, swept his hair back, and shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and slurped another mouthful of noodles.

He didn’t even want to look at Kaidan to see how that performance had gone over. It was the least smooth play Shepard had ever made at being smooth. His ears were going to go supernova.

“I’m gonna…” Kaidan cleared his throat. It wasn’t the hot sauce—because Kaidan could be bushido, too, especially when Shepard least expected it. “Bathroom,” Kaidan said. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom.”

His exit was actually pretty graceful, especially compared to Shepard’s chopstick attack, although it reminded Shepard of the one thing he’d always known: that this was going to be the view of Kaidan he ended up with, the last one he ever got. A smart guy figuring it all out, then getting up and walking away.

The door to the bathroom in the back swung shut. The bad hip hop kept playing. One of the cops was eyeballing him, but Shepard was used to that.

And Shepard’s hand was still on his neck, palm curved over the pulse where the little bruise was waiting. Shepard hadn’t even seen it; he didn’t know what color it was or how long it was gonna last. He could still smell Kaidan on his t-shirt but the longer they spent over bowls of pho the sooner that’d fade, until Shepard went to sleep that night smelling hot sauce on cotton instead of Kaidan’s shampoo.

Some fancy stuff that kept his hair the way he liked it, even when it rained. Kaidan’s whole room smelled like it. His laundry. His sheets.

Shepard’s eyebrows were sweating but it wasn’t from the spice—or how stupid it was that he wasn’t using his time like a real sensei, hiding the jalapenos between the folds of his napkin while Kaidan…

While Kaidan tried to figure out how to ask him if they could forget all about that and _wow_ , he’d really been drunk, huh? That he didn’t remember most of it; that it was awkward but, you know, if Shepard wouldn’t mind acting like it’d never happened, that’d be great.

_Sure,_ Shepard would say.

_I knew you didn’t mean it the whole time._

_Didn’t know you liked to live on the edge like that, Kaidan._

Kaidan’s mouth—he always tapped a capped highlighter at the corner while he was reading Shakespeare—on Shepard’s throat.

That muscle in Shepard’s cheek twitched. He was hungry, but no matter how many noodles he slurped his stomach still didn’t feel like it was full. Probably because what Shepard wanted was Kaidan, in a place where the ceiling and walls weren’t closing in on him. Getting kissed under the sky.

_You’re hot, Kaidan_ , Shepard thought, but even in his own head the words sounded all wrong. Not breathless, like Kaidan had been; not eager, not soft, not raspy.

_You’re so hot, and you don’t even know it._

Some of the hot water splashed up from the bowl onto Shepard’s face. He was wiping it off with a napkin full of jalapenos when Kaidan came back, hand stuck in a pocket, fishing out his wallet.

Even when he did simple things like that, like lifting his hips in the back seat of a cab or searching for change for the bus or scratching the back of his neck—even that was hot, stupid hot, crazy hot. Shepard stared up at Kaidan, his tight t-shirt, his flushed throat, his chin and his lips, the pink on his cheeks and the worry in his eyes.

“I’m ready to go when you are,” Kaidan said. He slid a credit card out of his wallet and set it down on the table; of course it got the waitress’ attention and she brought over the bill. Shepard went for the crinkled wad of cash he kept in his pocket but Kaidan shook his head and handed off the card. “I got this, Shepard,” he said.

Shepard frowned. He was usually fast enough to throw down a twenty before Kaidan could argue. He didn’t resent the credit card or what it meant, but it was for Kaidan, not him. Kaidan’s meal ticket, ride ticket, whatever ticket, courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Alenko, always making sure their kid was fed and dressed and had a way home. It wasn’t meant for Shepards, not for mooches to take advantage of.

His hand was pressed to the side of his neck again and he pulled it away when he realized Kaidan was watching him.

There was nothing left of Shepard’s soup but a wash of broth and tiny scrappy bits that were next to impossible to pick up with chopsticks. That was the thing about pho: one minute it felt like the noodles went on for infinity, and then you were staring down into an empty bowl.

The waitress brought Kaidan’s credit card back, along with mints. Kaidan took one and popped it in his mouth.

“I’ll get it next time,” Shepard said. If there was a next time. If Kaidan ever wanted to hang out again with a guy who let him suck on his neck like that wasn’t a little bit weird.

Kaidan shrugged and pushed his glasses up his nose. He was even cute when he did that. Even when he stole Shepard’s line, which wasn’t a line at all, just a change in balance, the rise and fall of his shoulders.

Shepard swallowed. It was late. A bus rolled by the window and both of them watched it roar down the street and off into the distance.

“That was totally the last bus, wasn’t it,” Kaidan said. His fingers had swept up into his bangs and he looked flushed and sleepy. Hot. _Hot_.

“Probably.” Shepard pulled his phone out of his pocket. Three a.m. was minutes away. “…Definitely.” 

Kaidan sucked in a big breath, then let out one of his long, rough-edged sighs. “I’ll call us a cab.”

They stood on the curb and waited, a solid foot of space between them even though all the warmth of the day had gone out of the air and Kaidan was wearing shorts. Shepard had goose bumps and it would have been nice to let their forearms brush, to stand close enough to share body heat.

It was off the table, though. A lot of things were off the table.

In the cab, nobody talked. Normally they did silence okay, but this was awkward. Loaded. When they pulled up in front of the Alenko house, Kaidan’s credit card made another appearance and Shepard let it happen. He’d stuff a twenty in Kaidan’s back pocket sometime. Hopefully; if he could get away with it. Maybe the time for getting away with that kind of thing had come and gone while Shepard was busy letting Kaidan give him a hickey.

They went around the back of the house and Kaidan paused at the foot of the tree. He took his glasses off and crammed them in his pocket. “Well…” he said. “Do you… uh. You gonna…”

Shepard scuffed his heel against a root and pushed his hair back. “Yeah, I should probably… I should go,” he said.

Kaidan was embarrassed, his cheeks still pink and his lips swollen from the spice in the soup. He looked…hot was the wrong word. He looked beautiful. Shepard shoved his hands in his pockets. 

“Okay.” Kaidan stepped forward until they were almost face to face. Shepard could feel the heat coming off him, his chest all warmth and so close to Shepard’s. “I’m gonna do something and you can, uh. You can hate me after if you want, but I’m— I’m gonna do it,” Kaidan said.

Then, he grabbed the collar of Shepard’s t-shirt and kissed him.

Shepard blinked. Kaidan’s mouth was soft against his. Their noses bumped and then Kaidan’s tongue was tracing along Shepard’s lower lip. Shepard’s jaw dropped and his lips parted and Kaidan’s tongue slipped in, across his teeth.

It was hot. It was hot because Kaidan was hot, and it was hot—spicy hot—because Kaidan had eaten his pho with jalapenos and sriracha and chili oil not because he was trying to prove anything, but because he liked it that way.

Kaidan broke the kiss and Shepard’s chin tilted after him, trying to keep their faces close together. He licked his own lips because they were burning and because he wanted to keep tasting Kaidan, his fingers caught in the hem of Kaidan’s t-shirt next to his hip.

Kaidan let out this shaky little breath. 

Shepard could’ve swallowed it but there was no way of knowing if it’d stick in his throat, choke his lungs, or be too much for him to keep inside his chest. Kaidan’s mouth was still half-open, trying to twist in that way it did when he was thinking too hard but, somehow, not coming up with anything. Or coming up with the wrong thing, knowing it was wrong, but having to turn in something.

It didn’t happen that often. Kaidan tended to be right ten times as often as he was wrong. Shepard’s fingers pressed into Kaidan’s side and moved him closer, close enough that it had to be obvious how hard he was.

Kaidan sighed again—more than just relief. Shepard had no idea what Kaidan was expecting and even less of a clue what _he_ was expecting. It wasn’t about being bushido anymore.

Shepard brushed some of Kaidan’s hair away, making sure there was nothing on his throat, hiding the tricky, quickened pulse, and kissed him over the vein.

The whole teeth thing… It was gonna take a while to get used to that. When Shepard thought about maybe biting Kaidan there where the skin was soft and smelled like soap and shampoo and clean sheets and, okay, a little bit like hot sauce, always something spicy underneath, his whole stomach twisted like a bike crash. Like all the times Shepard had tried a new move and wound up flat on his back, the wheels spinning, his gut as bent out of shape as the spokes.

Kaidan made the noises, though. Breath snagging, tearing, pulling free, only to get sucked back in, his pulse never quite catching a steady rhythm.

Hot. _Hot_. And Shepard didn’t always like hot things.

Sometimes, he _like_ liked them.

It was Kaidan’s fingers in his hair that made him stop, Kaidan’s blunt nails scraping over Shepard’s scalp, Shepard’s damp mouth on Kaidan’s damp skin.

“Uh,” Shepard said, pulling back.

“I guess now we match,” Kaidan replied, his pupils blown, his lips swollen, like he’d been licking them.

And he had. Before and after he’d been kissing Shepard with them. And during.

When he touched the mark on Shepard’s throat, Shepard’s pulse thudded loud enough that he kept waiting for the porch light to come on, for Mrs. Alenko to show up in pajamas with her arms folded.

Shepard was ruining Kaidan’s life in his own backyard.

“See you tomorrow?” Shepard asked. When he shrugged, the whole world moved with him, and Kaidan too—Shepard was still holding a handful of cotton, knuckles bumping Kaidan’s hip.

“Yeah,” Kaidan said. “Yeah, definitely.”

“Cool.” Eventually, something had to give, like Shepard letting go—which he did, for long enough to fish the twenty out of his back pocket and stick it into Kaidan’s instead, an arm around his waist, his palm sliding against Kaidan’s ass. “See you tomorrow.”

What he meant was _I like you too, Kaidan,_ but Kaidan was smart, so maybe he’d figure it out.

  


**END**


End file.
